Consulting in Libya: Everything and Everyone You Should Know

Author: Tariq Al-Fituri

Long before oil made Libya rich, Italian administrators in the 1920s hired surveyors and civil engineers from Turin and Rome. After independence, the monarchy turned to British geologists, and Muammar Gaddafi’s revolutionary state later courted American drilling specialists. Advice, in other words, was something to be imported. From 1969 until the early 1990s, ministries and state-owned companies flew in foreign consultants for tightly defined tasks: seismic interpretation one month, refinery troubleshooting the next. Local engineers were often relegated to note-taking.

The custom was upended in 1992 when the United Nations adopted Security Council Resolution 748, grounding international flights and freezing contracts. Global consulting brands packed up overnight; only small technical detachments with special licenses lingered, and even they struggled to move staff and spare parts. Crucial work continued, but it had to be done with Libyan labour, Arabic manuals and a budget in sharply devalued dinars.

Sanctions and self-reliance

Necessity spawned invention. Engineers who had trained in Houston or Aberdeen and returned home in the 1980s now found themselves the country’s senior experts. A handful of them formed micro-consultancies, pooling experience accumulated on rigs in Sirte Basin or gas plants near Mellitah. The environment was hardly forgiving. Projects were paid in instalments that followed the state’s irregular cash flow, software updates were shipped by diplomatic pouch and professional journals arrived months late. Yet the same constraints gave local advisers an advantage: networks inside the National Oil Corporation, cultural fluency in client offices and a willingness to teach while they worked.

By the time sanctions began to loosen in 2003, a small consulting ecosystem had taken root. It remained narrow, still centred on hydrocarbons, but it had proved that Libyan knowledge workers could deliver complex assignments without the protective halo of a foreign brand.

Qabas and the quest for home-grown expertise

One firm stood out in that formative decade. Qabas Scientific for Consultancy and Training – القبس العلمية للاستشارات والتدريب – was incorporated in Tripoli in 1994 by frustrated professionals at the time watching reservoir performance decline while outside help was banned from site. Their pitch to the National Oil Corporation was direct: let us tackle the diagnostic work, and we will teach your staff to run the models next time. Contracts followed, first on ageing oilfields in the east, then on pipeline integrity across the central desert. Qabas placed Arabic documentation and classroom teaching at the centre of each engagement, an approach that quickly set it apart from consultants who treated knowledge as proprietary.

Sanctions relief posed an existential question. International rivals would soon return with fresher software and deeper pockets. Qabas chose expansion over entrenchment. In 2001 it accepted an offer to advise Algeria’s Sonatrach on quality-management systems; a few years later it travelled to Nigeria, working through an affiliate of its Libyan client AGIP. The projects were limited in scope, but they proved that Libyan engineers could operate competitively in foreign markets and, in the process, absorb global best practice that could be repatriated.

Diversification in wartime and beyond

If sanctions had tested resilience, civil war tested it harder. The uprising of 2011 shuttered export terminals, emptied corporate apartments and left invoices unpaid for months. In response, Qabas dismantled the idea that its future lay only in oil. Aviation regulators in Tripoli needed safety audits when the skies reopened; telecom operators launching 3G signals required spectrum pricing and regulatory advice; hospitals hammered by power cuts sought workflow redesign. The firm established small units for each new demand, staffed them with engineers retrained in action-research methods and continued to pair every recommendation with a transfer of skills.

What emerged over the next decade was not a giant, but a nimble, multi-sector consultancy. It became routine for a project manager who once modelled production decline in Waha fields to spend the next quarter benchmarking airport maintenance or rolling out cyber-resilience drills for a state bank. The glue was a knowledge-management platform that turned each engagement into case material for the next internal workshop.

The road ahead

Today Libya is once again talking about reconstruction – new roads, solar farms in the Sahara, digitised public services and, perhaps, long-delayed constitutional reform. Advisory demand will surge in waves, crest when budgets are approved and collapse when politics stalls. Foreign consultancies eye the market with interest, but memories of frozen invoices, airport closures and capricious visa rules keep risk committees wary.

That calculus leaves space for firms such as Qabas. Its edge is not technology – the latest reservoir simulator can be bought off the shelf – but credibility with ministries and state companies that have lived through embargo, war and currency crises. The firm’s regional forays, brief though they were, also give it a network of North-African and West-African alumni who can be tapped when projects require multilingual or cross-border coordination.

Challenges remain. Local consultancies still struggle to finance long pursuits, insure staff or comply with the due-diligence regimes demanded by multilateral lenders. Brain drain is a constant worry; Europe’s energy firms continue to lure top graduates with salaries Libyan employers cannot match. Yet if Libya’s future growth depends on cultivating home-grown expertise rather than importing it on business-class tickets, the trajectory of Qabas suggests a workable template: teach while advising, keep teams Libyan at the core, and treat regional work as a laboratory rather than a diversion.

In a country where wells can be switched off by a single checkpoint and budgets revised at the stroke of a parliamentary boycott, resilience matters as much as technical excellence. Qabas, forged under sanctions and tempered by conflict, shows how a consultancy can acquire both.

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